Under the right of access to documents in the EU treaties, as
developed in Regulation 1049/2001, I am requesting all documents,
including notes of minutes, emails and other correspondence,
relating to contacts between staff of DG EMPL and staff of law
firm Clifford Chance, between January 2008 and February 2013.

We refer to your email of 6 February 2013 (our references GESTDEM
2013/0585), in which you submit a request for access to all documents,
including notes of minutes, emails ans other correspondence, relating to
contacts between staff of the Directorate-General Employment, Social
Affairs and Inclusion and staff of law firm Clifford Chance, between
January 2008 and February 2013.

This is a very broadly formulated request, which would require extensive
searches on different locations. It is not really feasable to retrieve
documents on these criteria. In particular, for a significant part of the
period covered by your request, there is no central electronic archiving
of correspondence. Therefore, searches in paper files would be necessary,
which would be very labour-intensive and time consuming.

Furthermore, correspondence with law firms may cover very different
subjects and some of it is likely to be confidentiual in nature.

Consequently, we are unable to handle your request in its present form. We
would kindly ask you to make a more targeted request.

In accordance with your request for a more targeted access to documents request - due to the labour-intensive and time consuming nature of dealing with my request as previously formulated - I will narrow the time period and scope of my request as follows.

I will reduce the time span of my request to one year, from February 2012 to February 2013. I trust that this will address the issue of having no central electronic archiving of correspondence, for a significant part of the period covered by my original request (Jan 2008-Feb 2013).

Furthermore, since Clifford Chance is a large, multinational law firm, with branches all over the world, I will reduce the scope of my request to cover only correspondence between staff of DG EMPL and three particular branches of Clifford Chance: the Brussels,
Paris and London offices of Clifford Chance.

1 Attachment

Thank you for accepting to narrow the time period and the scope of your
request. Research was organized in our Directorate General accordingly and
I would like to inform you that no exchange took place between staff of
DG EMPL and the Brussels, Paris or London offices of Clifford Chance,
between February 2012 and February 2013.